Is this a road worth taking?
A family emergency reunites a young art graduate and her elderly aunt for a memorable road trip across 1990s China. Sunny’s life is at a crossroads. She knows everything’s about to change. She just doesn’t know how yet.
I honestly didn’t know what to expect from a game called Road to Guangdong, but essentially it’s a visual novel type of game where you inherit a restaurant and begin a journey in a car with your aunt, meeting people you’ve only seen in faded photographs. There are choices to be made here to determine Sunny’s future and it’s a nice story overall.
Besides dialogue boxes to decide the way conversations go, you’ll spend a lot of time driving around a banged up old car that will need filling up along the way. Driving handles well for the most part, but it feels uneventful and actually unnecessary to the story where a quick load screen to the next location would have sufficed. I mean the game looks nice when you are driving, but there is no real challenge or any real need for it.
The game should take you a few hours to get through, though I don’t really see any need to go through it more than once afterwards. Visually, it’s got a nice art style to it and runs smoothly overall.
The Verdict
Road to Guangdong is a bit of an odd one. It has a decent story about family and works well overall, but the driving sections feel unnecessary to the overall plot. It’s a game that is fun to play through, but I can’t see any reason to play it more than once.